Delphi: Sharing Assessments of Cryptographic Assumptions

Share on

We’re extremely pleased to be able to introduce ‘Delphi: sharing assessments of cryptographic assumptions’, an advanced research initiative developed by Jeroen van de Graaf and Arjen K. Lenstra.

Almost all practical cryptographic protocols are based on computational or ad-hoc assumptions. Assessing the strengths of these assumptions is therefore a key factor in evaluating the risks of the systems using them. Discussions around these assumptions are often limited to taking place during coffee breaks of major crypto-conferences, or confined to isolated groups. Our goal is to make these discussions explicit and public, gathering the knowledge of hundreds of experts.

To this end we developed **Delphi**, an online questionnaire to document researchers' opinions and beliefs about the strengths of the most important assumptions. All responses received will be made accessible on our website, and we also intend to consolidate these responses and publish the results.

The current paper addresses classical cryptographic assumptions, whereas Delphi 2, a separate questionnaire dedicated to Ethereum, zkSNARKs, zk-friendly hash functions, and similar primitives, is currently under development. Since many of these primitives are relatively new and haven't been subject to the test of time, this joint effort to compare primitives should be of great help to our community.

The paper is published on the Cryptology ePrint Archive: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/157

Jeroen van de Graaf is Senior Cryptographer at ZKM and Associate Professor at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

Delphi: A brand new cryptographic research initiative by Jeroen van de Graaf & Arjen K. Lenstra.


More articles
ZKM Prover: Cross-Table Lookups
In zero-knowledge proofs, the lookup operation is used to verify the relationships between multiple tables. First, the data from the multiple tables is aggregated to form a query condition. Then, through the lookup, records that meet the condition are searched in the target table. Finally, the zero-knowledge proof generates a proof to verify the correctness of the query result without revealing any specific data.
Lookup Argument (Logup) and Code Analysis
When representing computations as circuits, there are often complex operations such as bitwise XOR and bitwise AND. For example, performing a bitwise XOR operation on two 32-bit bitstrings usually requires hundreds of addition and multiplication gates, significantly increasing circuit size. Introducing the Lookup argument protocol effectively reduces circuit complexity.
Delphi: Sharing Assessments of Cryptographic Assumptions

We’re extremely pleased to be able to introduce ‘Delphi: sharing assessments of cryptographic assumptions’, an advanced research initiative developed by Jeroen van de Graaf and Arjen K. Lenstra.

Almost all practical cryptographic protocols are based on computational or ad-hoc assumptions. Assessing the strengths of these assumptions is therefore a key factor in evaluating the risks of the systems using them. Discussions around these assumptions are often limited to taking place during coffee breaks of major crypto-conferences, or confined to isolated groups. Our goal is to make these discussions explicit and public, gathering the knowledge of hundreds of experts.

To this end we developed **Delphi**, an online questionnaire to document researchers' opinions and beliefs about the strengths of the most important assumptions. All responses received will be made accessible on our website, and we also intend to consolidate these responses and publish the results.

The current paper addresses classical cryptographic assumptions, whereas Delphi 2, a separate questionnaire dedicated to Ethereum, zkSNARKs, zk-friendly hash functions, and similar primitives, is currently under development. Since many of these primitives are relatively new and haven't been subject to the test of time, this joint effort to compare primitives should be of great help to our community.

The paper is published on the Cryptology ePrint Archive: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/157

Jeroen van de Graaf is Senior Cryptographer at ZKM and Associate Professor at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

Delphi: A brand new cryptographic research initiative by Jeroen van de Graaf & Arjen K. Lenstra.